Harsimran Kaur On Aug 09, 2024, In Book Review, Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins
Rating: 5/5
Freedom is impressionistic; a self-nudging propaganda that thrives to dominate the conscious to explore possibilities to be liberated. India found its independence; a day enchanted by loudspeakers burling of irrevocable spirits and building a staccato of importunate masochism. Who were these people? Defenders or rebels, or awakened citizens of a new nation finally in carte blanche? Freedom meant to them a break from the ordinary, now in pursuit of extraordinary affirmations.
Freedom, India’s freedom has a history; tiring and a cesspool of draconian subjugation and dystopian inequities. The imperialistic war, puerile and perilous, was a coarse feathered rug sweeping in the enfeebled, sifted with caged dust. The loud cries often crushed away; found many voicing a soliloquy cry and many furtively creeping off to dress as the ‘implacable revolutionaries’. India finally became an independent dominion on the stroke of midnight, 14th August 1947. The indispensible astrological influence had a strong bearing even on the last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, to define the historical moment. He was the man responsible for relieving India of the subjugation to British imperialism, giving it a stamp of self-governance and self-reliance.
All this was not a smooth sail. The arduous voyage had the ship fluttering at regular intervals, the ground beneath the feet wobbled to make one fall into the tiring stream of water running across, and the flagpole drifting downwards losing its identity and sturdily. Here the ship is the vast boundary of India holding on its ground its people, fighting against the tyranny of the British Empire making an effort not to let fall their beliefs and ideals.
“Freedom at Midnight” by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins is a memoir about this voyage, impeccably drafted and presented to its reader. The book traces the inception of British reign in India – their subsequent expansions and conquest, vividly talks about the imperturbable Mahatma Gandhi with his hallmark ideology of non-violence, the vivisection of India, the affluent and unpardonable Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the very charismatic and quick-witted Mountbatten and the dark coal in the mine – Nathuram Godse.
Introspective and abundantly chronicled, ‘Freedom at Midnight’ is a story of a nation often triggered by religious ambivalence and political whataboutery. It’s a tale of disputable regimes and impassioned ideologies, in a way that led the political leaders to create boundaries for their personal benefit. Jinnah and Gandhi were religiously adamant people and somewhere the lack of rationale made the two cohesively dependent. ‘Partition’, still an imprecation, benefitted their false ego but had to die amidst idiosyncratic impulses; Guardians turned into a gaffe! The impact of partition was irreplaceable, leading to carnage unimaginable and indigestible.
Fermenting desires shattered and an apocalypse awaited; Hindus and Muslims ripped apart to grime their own juice. Neglect or recriminations, what followed assumed a de rigueur of identity politics still prevalent today. Who is to blame? The Puritanical RSS infringement or the suffocating minority distress that sometimes is an inflexible roadblock! The present today has a past insidiously claiming its roots to unresolved shifts. The book in a pirouette falls to address the naked ground realities; Gandhi’s non-violence and the revolutionary pragmatism. The flamboyant protégée of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, did have his share in the pie, thereby carrying a radical optimism to govern the country after independence. A Kashmiri Pundit, he witnessed the brutal prolapse of Kashmir in depredation, finally resting as a deus ex machina when Maharaja Hari Singh agreed its accession to India.
TAKE AWAYA book for soaking abundance of knowledge, heartening to the core!